Reviewed by Suzi Steffen

In this mostly riveting book, Jon Lee Anderson, a reporter for The New Yorker, writes a first-person account of the American war in Iraq.  To those of us living in the United States, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” has been narrated mostly from the point of view of reporters “embedded” in U.S. military units.  Anderson chose instead to live in a hotel in Baghdad and report from there, a vantage point that allowed him to chronicle daily civilian life in Iraq as war overtook the country. 

In this book, completed quickly and compiled both of material from his New Yorker stories and expanded anecdotes, Anderson portrays life in Iraq through sketches and interviews.  Although he does not attempt a deep analysis of the issues surrounding the war and its violent aftermath, the immediacy of his reporting often reveals the landscape of the war.

The narrative flows chronologically, but Anderson uses specific individuals—one, an artist and doctor who was one of Saddam Hussein’s best friends—as touchstones throughout the book.  He punctuates the larger narrative of the war and the collapse of Saddam’s regime with updates on the families and personal lives of his drivers, interpreters, and his frequent contacts. 

Occasionally, the immediate details of Anderson’s own life seem trivial—or even petty, when he inserts digs at TV journalists—in comparison to the more resonant passages about the war’s effects.  But The Fall of Baghdad remains a powerful account of the cost of the war and its aftermath on the citizens of the Iraq.